Critical Essay by Alan Jacobs

In the following essay, Jacobs provides a critical overview of Soyinka's life and work, praising Soyinka's “comprehensive genius” and asserting that he regards Soyinka as one of the greatest living writers.

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Like many teachers of literature, I am sometimes asked to name the Greatest Living Writer. (I can hear the capital letters in the voices of those who ask.) Invariably I name two candidates: the Polish-Lithuanian poet Czeslaw Milosz and the Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka. These names are usually greeted by puzzlement, for, though both have won the Nobel Prize for Literature—Milosz in 1980 and Soyinka in 1986—and both have been on The McNeil-Lehrer Newshour, neither has entered the American public...